Monthly Archives: "February 2007"

Photography has been a passion of mine for a very long time. When I was younger, I had considered having a career as a photojournalist, but over time that slowly morphed into just a passionate hobby. Now I consider myself among the category of "prosumers" that are willing to spend money, time and effort on

Something odd happened about ten days ago, and it got me thinking about hidden blog traffic. As many of you who read this content directly on my blog might have noticed, I publish my Feedburner RSS subscriber count on the right hand sidebar of my blog. For those of you reading this on one of

Blackberry’s recent "Share Your Stories" campaign was inspiring for me, though probably not in the way they intended. I actually love my Blackberry, but their entire "Share your Story" campaign just struck me as lacking in any of the lessons many other marketers have learned about Web 2.0 marketing and what works in social media.

As a marketer, I should be in love with Apple. After all, I have an iPod and a Mac at home – and Apple’s marketing success offers lessons for anyone wanting a great case study on how to position products, launch them into the market, and use distinctive product design to connect with consumers. Getting

Ethnicity has always been an appealing niche for foreign language newspapers and magazines to local cable television programs. Restaurants, churches and temples are all centers for exploring global cultures in the real world. Yet on the Internet, the most successful ethnically focused sites seem to be the online dating sites such as Shaadi.com, JDate and

Netflix has always focused on innovation with everything from their award winning user interface to the longstanding Netflix Prize. Aside from technical innovation, they have also pioneered a new business model for online on-demand movie downloading by charging consumers based on the hours they watch, streaming movies without actually downloading them and letting users switch

There is a restaurant at the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas called Mr. Lucky’s 24/7. As the name suggests, it’s open all the time every day – but that’s hardly unique in Las Vegas. Their menu is like most other menus at cafe restaurants in hotels … serving the usual entrees coupled with the

Karl over at ExperienceCurve posted an interesting question for bloggers yesterday about how you would react to getting free products as a blogger and what sense of obligation you might feel. Nokia is experimenting with this, and just about every consumer products brand I work with is considering it and trying to find the right

Ok, maybe you have … and it just might be Flixster, a social network dedicated to film, actors, Hollywood and movie fans. The obvious question you could be wondering is how it can be "the ultimate" when there are so many other social networks that have been around longer, pull more traffic, have more users

This past weekend I was moderating a panel at CommunityNext, a smart event focused on everything about online communities coordinated by Noah Kagan. The event was a fun gathering of extremely smart folks from some of the hottest online communities today – and panelists/speakers shared many great thoughts on topics ranging from how to be